Mr. Shajee Kozhukkunnon, Sr. Regional Manager, Moxa India Industrial Networking Pvt. Ltd.
Moxa is a leading provider of industrial networking, computing, and automation solutions for enabling the Industrial Internet of Things. With over 30 years of industry experience, Moxa has connected more than 50 million devices worldwide and has a distribution and service network that reaches customers in more than 70 countries. Here is the interview with Mr. Shajee Kozhukkunnon, Sr. Regional Manager, Moxa India about IoT trends and Moxa solutions.
1. How do you see the adoption of the internet of things, both globally as well as in India?
IoT is in the peak of its popularity now. It is estimated that 5% of the Global opportunity will be from India. The implementation of smart cities promises a lot of funding for numerous start ups in India, and we will see a lot of IoT implementation happening in the 1st 100 smart cities.
2. What are the trends you see in this field?
3 trends we see becoming more popular as:
a) Reliable solutions gain more acceptability, not the economical ones. People started talking about the design life.
b) Industrial rated devices required as the devices are out on to the field not in the A/C Environment of IT.
c) Hardware combined software solution from the same organization is more acceptable than that either one as the combined solutions are more reliable. People often refer the reliability of Apple devices.
3. Can you guess the market size of IoT in India for us?
According to Nascom, the IoT market is in India is expected to be around 15B USD by 2020. This is roughly 5% of the Global market
4. Which are the industry verticals you see gaining traction in deploying IoT solutions?
Smart water vertical is gaining momentum as it is going to be the biggest challenge for all cities. It is already the top priority across India. As the water eco system is complicated, wide spread and the requirements change with season, the scope of automation is very high, with complicated communication system requirements.
5. How is your company positioned in this scheme of things? Where does exactly it fit in the ecosystem?
One of the challenges in water is to get the data from a distributed system which are placed far apart. A typical automation systems work on a polling system, i.e. the central SCADA system will keep querying the status of the sensors continuously and sensors will report continuously. This will create a lot of traffic in the communication system. As of now the possible communication medium is LTE (4G) and heavy usage of data for the communication will increase the OPEX for the End user.
Moxa has a solution in which the sensor inputs can be monitored and can “Report by Exception”. This means when everything is healthy, no data is sent out. But when there is any change in the healthy condition, these Moxa devices will send the data to the SCADA system without waiting for SCADA to query. This make the system response quicker and substantially reduce the data usage thereby reducing the OPEX. Moreover, Moxa can give the OPC server, and hence can easily integrate with customer’s existing SCADA.
6. Can you give us a brief about the IoT solutions you have for various industry verticals?
Moxa’s expertise is into the communication of sensor data to the cloud or server. Moxa has 3 solutions in this area:
a) Digital /Analog input from sensors : Convert “Dumb’ devises to Smart making them communicable on Ethernet (Wired or wireless Network)
b) Legacy devices with Serial RS485 output : Convert these Semi “Dumb” devices to smart and communicable on Ethernet
c) Front End Processors with Software: Ready to run gateway computers with Software to uplink to the cloud.
In short, Moxa has the capability to transport the data from any form to the cloud.
7. How do you look at Industrial IoT for manufacturing automation and what are the growth opportunities
We are already engaged with IoT solution for communicating the data in the shop floors in different manufacturing sectors like Automobile, F&B and Consumer Electronics. We see an increasing awareness and growing demand in these sectors due the productivity enhancements provided by the IoT solutions. We are keen to our expertise and experience in this area in one-one interactions with interested Organisations.
8. Which are the major concerns associated with IIoT?
Major concern with IIoT is the climatic conditions. The “things” are out in the street exposed to temperature, humidity and Rain. Hence most of the time the Industrial IoT gateways / Interface devices to sensors are housed in the IP65/66 enclosures, sometimes even kept underground. The average max temperature in Major cities in India is 40 degree. The ambient inside these enclosures rise 10-15 degree more (Due to limited convection in IP66) making it 55 degree. Any equipment which is going to be housed in this enclosure has to be rated 10-15 degree higher, i.e. to work at 70 degree and has to be fanless. This is not so easy to achieve. Companies like Moxa could be a good choice here.
9. What are Moxa’s investments in research and development activities?
Moxa spends substantial portion of our revenue back into R&D. In fact 35% of Moxa’s Manpower is in R&D
10. How Moxa’s intelligent transportation works in India?
Moxa is actively involved with Smart Rail solutions for Metro rail projects in India. Currently 4 projects are under implementation with Moxa solution. This is for critical applications like CBTC (Communication Based Train Control) / CCTV real time train to Ground communication.
